Arthur Schnitzler (German: [ˈʃnɪtslɐ]; 15 May 1862 – 21 October 1931) was an Austrian author and playwright. He is considered one of the most important figures in Viennese Modernism, a movement in Austrian art and literature around the turn of the 20th century. His plays and stories explored the lives of people in Vienna’s middle and upper classes during the early 1900s. He carefully recorded the details of society in his writing. His Jewish background and the themes of sexuality in his works caused controversy and were sometimes banned during his lifetime and after.

Life

Arthur Schnitzler was born on Praterstrasse 16, Leopoldstadt, Vienna, the capital of the Austrian Empire. At that time, Austria was part of the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary. He was the son of Johann Schnitzler (1835–1893), a well-known Hungarian specialist in throat diseases, and Luise Markbreiter (1838–1911), who was the daughter of a Viennese doctor named Philipp Markbreiter. Both of Schnitzler’s parents were from Jewish families. In 1879, he began studying medicine at the University of Vienna and earned his medical degree in 1885. He worked at Vienna’s General Hospital (German: Allgemeines Krankenhaus der Stadt Wien) but later chose to write instead of continuing as a doctor.

On August 26, 1903, Schnitzler married Olga Gussmann (1882–1970), a 21-year-old woman who hoped to become an actress and singer. She came from a Jewish middle-class family. The couple had a son, Heinrich (1902–1982), born on August 9, 1902. In 1909, they had a daughter named Lili, who died by suicide in 1928. Schnitzler and Olga separated in 1921. He died on October 21, 1931, in Vienna from a brain hemorrhage. In 1938, after the Anschluss, his son Heinrich moved to the United States and did not return to Austria until 1959. Heinrich is the father of Michael Schnitzler, an Austrian musician and conservationist born in 1944 in Berkeley, California. Michael moved to Vienna with his parents in 1959.

Literary works

Arthur Schnitzler’s works often caused debate because they openly described sexuality. In a letter to Schnitzler, Sigmund Freud wrote, “I have gained the impression that you have learned through intuition—although actually as a result of sensitive introspection—everything that I have had to unearth by laborious work on other persons.” His works also strongly opposed antisemitism, as seen in his play Professor Bernhardi and his novel Der Weg ins Freie. However, even though Schnitzler was Jewish, Professor Bernhardi and Fräulein Else are among the few works with clearly identified Jewish characters.

After the release of his play Reigen, in which 10 pairs of characters are shown before and after the sexual act, ending with a prostitute, Schnitzler was labeled a pornographer. The controversy surrounding the play often included antisemitic comments. Reigen was made into a French film in 1950 by the German-born director Max Ophüls, titled La Ronde. The film was very successful in English-speaking countries, making the play better known under its French title. Other adaptations include The Merry-Go-Round (1920), Circle of Love (1964), Der Reigen (1973), and 360 (2009).

In the novella Fräulein Else (1924), Schnitzler may be responding to a criticism by Otto Weininger (1903) by focusing on the sexuality of a young Jewish female protagonist. The story, told from the perspective of a young aristocratic woman, describes a moral dilemma that ends in tragedy.

When asked if his works often focused on the same subjects, Schnitzler replied, “I write of love and death. What other subjects are there?” Despite his serious themes, Schnitzler often used bedroom farce in his plays. Professor Bernhardi, a play about a Jewish doctor who turns away a Catholic priest to protect a patient from learning about her illness, is his only major dramatic work without a sexual theme.

A member of the avant-garde group Young Vienna, Schnitzler experimented with formal and social rules. In his 1900 novella Lieutenant Gustl, he was the first to use stream-of-consciousness narration in German fiction. The story portrays its protagonist and the army’s strict code of honor in an unflattering way. This led to Schnitzler losing his commission as a reserve officer in the medical corps.

Schnitzler specialized in shorter works, such as novellas and one-act plays. In stories like “The Green Tie” (“Die grüne Krawatte”), he showed skill in writing short fiction. He also wrote two full-length novels: Der Weg ins Freie, about a talented but unmotivated young composer, and Therese, which was less artistically successful.

Schnitzler kept a detailed diary from age 17 until two days before his death. The diary, which includes almost 8,000 pages, is notable for its casual descriptions of sexual experiences. He often had relationships with multiple women at once and, for several years, recorded every orgasm. The diary was published in ten volumes between 1981 and 2000 by the Austrian Academy of Sciences and is available digitally since 2019.

Collections of Schnitzler’s letters have also been published. Major correspondences with Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Hermann Bahr, Sigmund Freud, Otto Brahm, and Richard Beer-Hofmann have appeared in print. Since 2018, the Austrian Academy of Sciences has been preparing a detailed edition of Schnitzler’s letters with fellow writers, including over 4,000 letters. Because Schnitzler’s life is well documented, a database listing over 47,000 recorded stays at nearly 5,000 locations was published online in 2025. It is currently the most comprehensive freely accessible record of the places associated with any historical individual.

Schnitzler’s works were called “Jewish filth” by Adolf Hitler and banned by the Nazis in Austria and Germany. In 1933, when Joseph Goebbels organized book burnings in Berlin and other cities, Schnitzler’s works were destroyed along with those of other Jews, including Einstein, Marx, Kafka, Freud, and Stefan Zweig.

Schnitzler’s novella Fräulein Else has been adapted multiple times, including the German silent film Fräulein Else (1929), starring Elisabeth Bergner, and the 1946 Argentine film The Naked Angel, starring Olga Zubarry.

In 1973, five of Schnitzler’s short stories were adapted as the BBC television series Vienna 1900.

Archive

The majority of Schnitzler's archive, which includes 40,000 pages of documents, was saved from the Nazis by a British man named Eric A. Blackall. At the request of Schnitzler's ex-wife, Olga, Blackall arranged for the documents to be secretly sent to Cambridge University using a special seal. After the war, this caused a legal problem because Olga did not have the right to give away the documents. Schnitzler had left the documents to his son, Heinrich, who was not in Vienna at the time. During and after World War II, Heinrich tried but did not succeed in getting the documents back. In 2015, Thomas Trenkler wrote in the newspaper Kurier that the British taking the documents was not legal and that the documents should be given to Schnitzler's remaining family. Schnitzler's grandsons, Michael and Peter, said they wanted the documents handed to them.

Selected works

• Anatol (1893), a play with seven acts about a wealthy man and his un成熟 relationships.
• Flirtation (Lovelei – 1895), also called The Reckoning. It was adapted into films by Max Ophüls in 1933 and Pierre Gaspard-Huit in 1958 (Christine). It was also adapted as Dalliance by Tom Stoppard in 1986 and as Sweet Nothings by David Harrower for the Young Vic in 2010.
• Fair Game (Freiwild – 1896)
• Light-'O-Love (1896)
• Reigen (1897), often called La Ronde. It is still performed often. Max Ophüls directed the first film version in 1950; Roger Vadim directed another in 1964, and Otto Schenk directed a third in 1973. In 1998, British playwright David Hare rewrote it as The Blue Room. It was also adapted into an Off-Broadway musical called Hello Again by Michael John LaChiusa in 1994. Suzanne Bachner created a modern version called "Circle" about 21st-century relationships in 2002. Austrian composer Bernhard Lang wrote an opera, Der Reigen, in 2012; it premiered in 2014 at the Schwetzingen Festival.
• Die Gefährtin (1899)
• Paracelsus (1899)
• The Green Cockatoo (Der grüne Kakadu – 1899). Composer Richard Mohaupt adapted it into a one-act opera called Der grüne Kakadu, which premiered at the Hamburg State Opera on September 16, 1958.
• The Lonely Way (Der einsame Weg – 1904)
• Intermezzo (Zwischenspiel – 1904)
• Der Ruf des Lebens (1906)
• Countess Mizzi or the Family Reunion (Komtesse Mizzi oder Der Familientag – 1907)
• Living Hours (1911)
• Young Medardus (Der junge Medardus – 1910)
• The Vast Domain (Das weite Land – 1911). It was adapted as Undiscovered Country by Tom Stoppard in 1979. Three films were made: one by Ernst Lothar in 1960 with Attila Hörbiger, one by Peter Beauvais in 1970 with O. W. Fischer, and one called The Distant Land by Luc Bondy in 1986 with Michel Piccoli.
• Professor Bernhardi (1912)
• The Comedy of Seduction (Komödie der Verführung – 1924)
• Comedies of Words and Other Plays (1917)

• The Road into the Open (Der Weg ins Freie – 1908)
• Therese. Chronik eines Frauenlebens (1928)

• Dying (Sterben – 1895)
• None but the Brave (Leutnant Gustl – 1900)
• Berta Garlan (1900)
• Blind Geronimo and his Brother (Der blinde Geronimo und sein Bruder – 1902)
• The Prophecy (Die Weissagung – 1905)
• Casanova's Homecoming (Casanovas Heimfahrt – 1918)
• Fräulein Else (1924)
• Rhapsody – also called Dream Story (Traumnovelle – 1925/26). It was adapted into the film Eyes Wide Shut by director Stanley Kubrick.
• Night Games (Spiel im Morgengrauen – 1926)
• Flight into Darkness (Flucht in die Finsternis – 1931)
• The Death of a Bachelor (Der Tod des Junggesellen – 1917)
• Late Fame (2014, written around 1894–1895). It was adapted into a film of the same name by director Kent Jones.

• My Youth in Vienna (Jugend in Wien), an autobiography published after the author’s death in 1968
• Diary, 1879–1931